Jerry Narron, manager of the Cincinnati Reds, is headed to Pittsburg this All-Star break to serve on the National League coaching staff.

Much ado was made about Narron recently completing his first 162 games with the team and his 83-78 record in that span. The Reds are 39-34 so far this season under his leadership, second in the central division.

He keeps this up, and it's gonna be mighty tough to hire Lou Piniella in the off-season.

Narron will certainly be accompanied by Bronson Arroyo, possibly by Ken Griffey, Jr., and probably not by Brandon Phillips or David Ross.

Bill Madden had a particularly schmaltzy piece in yesterday's New York Daily News. It was called Junior achievement: Staying on the field and it got awfully sentimental about one Ken Griffey, Jr., who, at the ripe old age of 36, is too young to be getting sentimental about, imo.

No less an authority than Hank Aaron himself predicted he would be the one to break the all-time home run record, but that was before Griffey came home to Cincinnati and seemingly began playing every season hurt. His legs have betrayed him these past five years and, as such, denied him the opportunity to make a run at Aaron that, instead, is being made by the cheater that is Barry Bonds.

In Junior's case, it is he who has been cheated, but as he was saying last night in the solitude of the Reds clubhouse before their 9-2 loss to the Mets, we should not feel sorry for him.

He's got a good point, of course. We could all feel sorry for Junior. If only he could have our lives, things would be OK for him.

But he doesn't want that! Oh, no! He'll put on a brave face and face the harsh reality of hanging with Tiger Woods, playing himself in video games, and tooling around in cars worth more than your life!

OK, that sounds nasty. I know that Junior isn't feeling sorry for himself, or, if he is, he's keeping it to himself. I'm just bitter because I write schmaltzy crap like this all the time, but I'm not getting printed in any big New York newspapers.

And for that, I blame Madden's steroid habit. Damn cheater.

Awesome. After some 20 hours of unscheduled down time, I'm pleased to see that Red-Hot-Mama.com is back on her feet. The official word from our host is that some IPs were incorrectly assigned during routine enhancements to the software. It was supposed to take 2-4 hours to correct.

In fact, this is how I imagine it really went down…

Ed (stumbling and bumping into a desk): Ouch, hey, who the hell left all these cords all over the floor?
Jim: Ed, you spaz.
Ed (rubbing his owie knee): Can't you people put your crap away?
Jim: What did you run into? Dammit, Ed, did you pull out those power cords again?
Ed: Oh, shit.
Jim: You've taken down all our sites! You really are a spaz.
Ed: This is going to take forever to fix. People are going to be pissed.
Jim: We better tell 'em.
Ed: Don't tell them I tripped on the cord!
Jim: Well, what do you want me to say?
Ed: Say we were doing routine maintenance--no, say we were providing enhancements. They can't be mad at us for messing up when we were trying to do something good for them.
Jim: OK, OK. When are you going to have this cleaned up? Tomorrow afternoon?
Ed: Don't say that! They'll freak. Say a couple hours.
Jim: You know you can't do it in two hours.
Ed: Fine, say “2-4 hours.” Later we can say it was a typo of “24” or something.

Can't complain, though. They *were* providing enhancements after all. At least he didn't spill coffee on it this time.